23.5.07

Taking his lead from John Kennedy's precept 'Peace is a Process', in the 2007 Reith Lectures, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, lays out a system of initiatives that government, institutions, and citizens can follow to achieve peace, limit climate change, and reduce economic inequality. In the last lecture, he claims a special place for scientists to organize to solve the world's ills, and cites Wikipedia and Linux as a model---a sort of Open Source government. Heady stuff; it's not often one encounters this scope of vision. The lectures are delivered from London, Beijing, New York, and (for the finale) Edinburgh, home of Adam Smith and the Enlightenment.

It is heady stuff, and I hope programs such as Sachs outlines succeed, but some of the negative reviews on Amazon give me pause: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3IU0ZM23XRSPY/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R3IU0ZM23XRSPY